Projecting climate effects on birds and reptiles of the Southwestern United States

Résumé fourni par la source

Among bird species, those that had the strongest association with a landscape feature during the breeding season, such as terrain ruggedness and insolation, exhibited the smallest contractions in projected breeding range in the future.In contrast, bird species that had weak associations with landscape features, but strong climatic associations, suffered the greatest breeding range contractions.Thus, landscape effects appeared to buffer some of the negative effects of climate change for some species.• Among bird species, magnitude of change in projected breeding range was positively related to the annual average temperature of their baseline distribution, thus species with the warmest breeding ranges exhibited the greatest changes in future breeding ranges.This pattern was not evident for reptiles, but might exist if additional species were included in the model.• Our results provide managers with a series of projected range maps that will enable scientists, concerned citizens, and wildlife managers to identify what the potential effects of climate change will be on bird and reptile distributions in the Western United States.We hope that our results can be used in proactive ways to mitigate some of the potential effects of climate change on selected species.

Ce résumé expose les affirmations des auteurs. BNTIC ne l’interprète pas comme une validation indépendante des résultats.